More Articles

The Dispatch E-Edition

All current subscribers have full access to Digital D, which includes the E-Edition and
unlimited premium content on Dispatch.com, BuckeyeXtra.com, BlueJacketsXtra.com and
DispatchPolitics.com.
Subscribe
today!

After 30 years of picking through the Scott Antique Markets, Elizabeth Kocher had her best find
yet yesterday at the Ohio Expo Center event.

Kocher snapped up a pair of obelisk-shape garden ornaments, each topped with a finial, suitable
for use as decorative plant supports. Worn white paint gave the 4-foot-tall wrought-iron forms the
rustic look she loves. Kocher plans to put them in her raised flower and vegetable beds.

What also delighted Kocher was the price: $40 for the pair. “You’re going to pay twice that
amount” or more at a lawn and garden store, she said.

The health of the antiques market is hard to sum up, given its breadth. But, in general, many
buyers such as Kocher have found more bargains in recent years during the recession — particularly
buyers of so-called middle-market antiques.

“The middle market has been struggling,” said Clayton Pennington, editor of
Maine Antique Digest, a publication based in Waldoboro, Maine, that covers the antiques
scene nationwide.

High-end antiques tend to hold their value, Pennington said, and their low-end brethren
typically do fine because of their affordability. It’s in the middle where much of the opportunity
lies for buyers.

“You can buy very good pieces of early American furniture at good prices,” Pennington said. “You
can buy decent furniture now at a good price: something that is handmade, that is American, and
that will hold its value to some point. ... The value is there.”

Part of the challenge for antique dealers has been to broaden their appeal beyond their base of
diehard collectors.

That’s been key for Joe Mongenas, 54, of Cincinnati, who deals in antique phonographs and
associated ephemera. The nostalgia associated with the music players, whose heyday was in the 1910s
and ’20s, attracts some people, including folks rehabilitating early 20th-century homes who want to
“complete the look,” he said.

“They were expensive in their day,” said Mongenas, noting that some phonographs cost more than a
Model T Ford. “Your average coal miner didn’t buy one,” at least not until their mass production in
the years before the advent of radio.

Like many dealers, Mongenas began his bond with antiques as a collector 23 years ago, hoping at
first to amass a major collection of the devices and then sell them off in order to fund a muscle
car. That was before he was laid off from his job at a computer-distribution warehouse. Now, he
sells phonographs for a living.

Mongenas said he’s had good success at the Scott market. He sold a Victrola on Saturday and
plans to return for a fourth season.

For him and other dealers, much of the future rests in the hands of thrifty young buyers such as
Liz Lech of Rochester, Mich., who spent the weekend in Columbus celebrating her 29th birthday with
friends.

The three friends’ finds included flint rocks and vintage Valentine’s Day cards. One of Lech’s
friends, Joanne Serio, 31, of Columbus, even picked up a 1970s-era plastic model of Scrubby, the
Scrubbing Bubbles mascot, hoping to use it as a fun prop for her local “eco-friendly” housekeeping
service, Clintonville Green Clean.

“It’s all about staying in touch with the past, for cheap,” Lech said.